It’s great to start by celebrating still being alive at the end of another year given that, in May 2017, I was told I might only live 2 years! 2024 saw me enter my 8th year post diagnosis having survived 7 years and still living well with stage 4 prostate cancer.
However, 2024 was plagued with knee problems. Surgery in late 2023 to trim a cartilage hadn’t made any difference and I was in significant pain impacting my day-to-day life and unable to do very much weight bearing exercise.
The surgeon was unimpressed when I went to see him within 6 weeks of the cartilage op, telling me that I hadn’t given it enough time to work. When I reminded him that I was living with incurable cancer and time was actually quite important, he relented and scheduled me for a part knee replacement on 1st May which went ahead as planned and I’m now bionic!
Recovery has been way tougher than expected. The knee itself is great but the loss of cardio vascular fitness had a huge impact and I’ve really struggled to get fitness back. It’s very much still a work in progress but I’m very determined!
January saw our now normal trip to the Canaries for some winter sunshine, this time to Tenerife where we were blessed with having our fabulous friends Steve and Sue with us, friendships that have lasted 6 decades are few and far between. We had a great time and were blessed with some lovely weather and amazing food.
Music has been a huge part of our lives but particularly since my cancer diagnosis. This is a link to an article I wrote about music and how it can save our mortal souls How Can Prostate Cancer Patients Use Music For Support? and 2024 was no exception to our musical meanderings as we went to loads of gigs. March is the annual Country2Country 4-day music festival in London which was great but I’d hoped would be the highlight of the musical year, seeing Bruce Springsteen at Wembley, turned out to be a disappointment as the sound quality was awful. The disappointment was at least offset by seeing the incredible ABBA Voyage which was utterly stunning!
We went to plenty more concerts and even ventured abroad to visit Tracey’s Brother David who lives in Amsterdam which gave us a chance to see Morgan Wallen who had become a huge star by then. Disappointingly, we’d had tickets to see him in a tiny Manchester venue in Spring 2020 before he rose to fame but we all know why that was cancelled.
I’m delighted that my work as a prostate cancer patient advocate went on at a pace in 2024. I was asked to be part of conferences in Paris and Hamburg and whilst they can be a little stressful, especially when you’re telling health care professionals that they could do things much better, they are a great experience with little old Tony the council estate scrote sharing a stage with some of the world’s leading Professors, Doctors and Oncologists in the field of prostate cancer. It’s great that patients are given a voice like this but even better when the health care professionals in the audience tell you they learned so much by listening to you. It’s also amazing that one of my presentations lead to a conversation with a urologist in Brazil about setting up Prostate Cancer support groups over there as they don’t have any.
Holidays in the UK have not been one of my happier experiences but we wanted to get away with all our kids and grandkids so we ventured to Paignton. Two car loads and Son and their dog in their campervan. It was quite an experience having 6 adults, 2 dogs and 4 children in our caravan for a Chinese takeaway! The weather was reasonably kind to us and we managed to avoid killing each other!
The 2nd half of the year presented some great opportunities to increase the patient voice as a patient advocate. In addition to the international conference in Hamburg I recorded some podcasts for Bayer, hosted a webinar for Tackle Prostate Cancer of which I’m Trustee and Vice Chair with Hash Ahmed the Chief Investigator of the £42m TRANSFORM prostate cancer screening trial and then was invited, by The Duchess of Gloucester, to an evening celebrating the work of Prostate Cancer UK at St James’s Palace and then the following day attended Parliament to support Prostate Cancer Research with the launch of their political campaign for prostate cancer screening. Who knows, one day, whilst I’m still alive, we may see screening in some form!
The 2nd half of the year also meant massive changes in our personal lives. We finally sold our home of 34 years in June after it having been on and off the market since before covid. This was a real wrench as I kept telling myself that I didn’t want to move whilst accepting that we had too as the house was now too big and unmanageable and we needed to get rid of the mortgage.
Remarkably it took nearly 6 months to complete and that period was horrendous as our life was in abeyance. Eventually though we did complete but couldn’t line our purchase up so ended up living in the upper two rooms of Mother in Laws dormer bungalow for7 weeks. We had a bed, a TV and Radler our German Shepherd dog. Quite an experience.
We then thankfully completed on our new house just before Christmas and moved to Thelwall. I was no longer an Altrincham boy but, as they say, you can take the boy out of Alty but you can’t take Alty out of the boy. I’d lived and worked in Alty for 67 years and it was a massive part of my life but it’s been quite an adventure since and I wish we’d moved years ago!
November was year 6 of Paint Altrincham Blue a concept that I came up with to have a week of men’s health awareness throughout the town. This was never meant to be a fundraiser but it raised over £5,000 and, who knows, may save a life or two. It was very flattering to be copied by Heald Green that became Heald Blue for a week.
From a running viewpoint there were lots of lows in 2024 thanks to the new knee but also some highs.
I’ve done some pretty amazing things in my running life but nothing has ever given me as much pleasure as coaching a group of complete beginners for my club and watching them as a group, develop friendships, improve as runners and then go on to do things they never dreamed possible when they first turned up on a cold January Saturday morning.
I also reached the milestone of 250 parkruns of which 226 have been since my diagnosis. We’ve done parkruns in 3 continents and 6 countries and yet I also hit the milestone of 200 parkruns at Wilmslow parkrun on the same day.
If you’ve got this far, well done. I write these reviews for my Grandkids to read when I’m no longer around but hopefully that’s a long time away yet!
Running Into Cancer 